The Chorae burns as a sun in her fingers, making red wine of her hand and forearm, revealing the shadow of her bones, and yet drawing the eye instead of rebuking it, a light that does not blind.
"I guard them!" she weeps, standing frail beneath the white-bleached Seal. "I hold the Gates!"
Of all their ordeals, none would be so great as climbing the Great Medial Screw. Where the Sranc had taken their toll in blood and lives, and the Wight-in-the-Mountain, or whatever it was they had encountered in the closeted deeps, had taken its toll in terror and spirit, the endless stairs of the Screw took everything that remained: courage, strength, and endurance-endurance above all. Climbing. Climbing. Climbing. Clinging to seams as they picked their way over collapsed sections. Hurrying past the hundreds of gaping black portals. Bending back their faces to remind themselves of the sky they sought, to wonder at the way it waxed and grew.
The first time the high blue point they climbed toward began darkening they had despaired, fearing they had been shut in, until they realized that it was simply night. They had been buried so long they had forgotten the cycle of the days.
Sometimes, with the inscrutable ideograms struck into the curvature of the endlessly rising walls, it seemed they crawled through the curled inside of a scroll. Sometimes, given the way the Screw crossed the course of some natural shaft, here bricked, here hewn, Achamian was reminded of the canals of Momemn, where cut waterways linked natural estuaries. But always he was struck by the ambition, the marriage of patience and hubris that had made such a work possible. A stair as tall as a mountain. There was a kind of madness in the fact of the Screw, one that dwarfed even the famed Ziggurats of Shigek.
Mimara had said nothing in two days. When he tried coaxing words from her, she would simply gaze at him. Her lips would twitch, sometimes they would even part, but no words would come, and a kind of helpless remorse would dim her eyes. He spent quite some time trying to puzzle through what had happened, to make sense of the crazed image of her, holding nothing but a Chorae, the same existential pit she carried beneath her belt now, quailing beneath a horror that should have devoured her whole, from the flesh of her fingertips to the final spark of her soul.
He knew something of demons, Ciphrang, knew that when summoned, a Chorae could destroy their corporeal form. But what faced them had risen on a tide of unreality. Hell had come with him, the shade of Gin'yursis, the last Nonman King of Cil-Aujas, and he should have taken them all, Chorae or no Chorae.
But something had happened. She had happened.
Anasыrimbor Mimara, cursed with the Judging Eye.
Despite the pity that filled him, there was a reprieve in her misfortune. It could be no coincidence that she had come to him when she had. The wiles of the Whore were at work here, the treachery of Fate. The more he pondered it, the more it seemed she had been given. It was his doom to hunt down the origins of the Aspect-Emperor, to shed light on the darkness that came before him. Cil-Aujas had resolved that question.
There was a bad period when the last of the qirri drained from them, where the most they could do was lay gasping. Somehow they slept, and somehow they found themselves unharmed when they awoke. After that, the climb was sheer misery. Dizziness and nausea. Cramped limbs. Several fainted for the effort and were only saved by the wits of their fellows. Achamian paused several times to vomit spittle.
The downward wind grew as they climbed, so chill that Achamian added an air warming Huiritic Ring to the Surillic Point-they needed to be sure of their footing-yet one more burden for his overtaxed soul. What had been a vast well above them became an endless pit below. Soon they could spy the source of the perpetual water that threaded the open spaces beyond the brink: ice and snow. It clotted the final tracts of the Screw, rising in shining humps against the cloudless plate of the sky.
After clambering across the first ice-sheathed steps and staring up across the angular slopes heaped across the stair, they realized their limbs could take them no farther. There was a look of grim confirmation in the dismay that deadened their eyes, as if they had known all along that Cil-Aujas would never relinquish them. Without explanation, Achamian bid them withdraw behind him. From behind glimmering Wards, he showed them what a Gnostic Wizard could do in the light of day. Ice and snow cracked and crashed, sloughed away in mountainous sheets, thundered so hard against his Wards that the stone of the stair even fractured beneath his feet. But he continued singing Abstractions, pure dispensations of force and light, and the geometries danced and twirled, striking and burning. And when he was done, bars of sunlight could be seen lancing through the mist, warming the bare black stone of Aenaratiol.
This was a kind of final knell for the Skin Eaters, a tipping point of comprehension. At last they understood the abyssal gap that had always existed between them, scalpers and Wizard. Achamian could see it in their sidelong glances. With the exception of their Captain, they began looking at him with an awe and reverence they had once reserved for Cleric.
And he felt an itch, something small and sharp against the buzz of His utter exhaustion… Some time passed before he recognized it: the creeping return of his guilt. These men, these strangers he would kill, now seemed his brothers.
It was no small thing to crawl out of the abyss, to rise from Hell to the very roof of the World. Though their eyes had long adjusted, they still stood blinking, scattered atop the snow-encrusted debris that ringed the opening to the Great Screw. It made Achamian, who stood arm in arm with Mimara, think of the first Men, savages of the plains, rubbing their eyes at what they could only comprehend as a blessing.
With light comes life. With sky comes freedom.
The Halls of Cil-Aujas, the dread Black Halls, had at last relinquished them.
Achamian looked to the remnants of their company, knowing they had reached a moment of decision. Aside from Lord Kosoter, only Soma, blessed with the luck of the daft, seemed unscathed. Sarl appeared intact in body but continued to betray a disordered soul-even now he grinned and rocked from heel to heel. Pokwas had gained strength on the climb, despite continuously bleeding from his scalp. The other veteran Skin Eaters, Xonghis, Sutadra, and Galian, wore septic bandages on their arms and thighs but seemed able enough. Of those the Bitten had called the Herd, all three survivors were Galeoth-Conger, Wonard, and Hameron-men Achamian had not known until the arduous climb up the Screw. Wonard was already showing signs of infection, and Conger seemed to hop more than walk. Hameron wept whenever Lord Kosoter's distraction afforded.
Their hair whipping in the wind, bereft of everything save their hauberks and their swords, the company stood, blank before the vista extending about them. Their trials had stained and stamped them: the purplish smear of Sranc blood, the rusty blots of their own, innumerable little cuts across their shins and knuckles, the mottling of sweat-and-dust-soaked skin. Though their stares were dead for fatigue, there was a madness in the quick twitches with which they cast them across the panorama.
They stood in the heart of Aenaratiol's extinct crater, on an island heaped with broken columns and gutted walls. A frozen lake surrounded them, gleaming black where not covered with dunes of snow. More ruins climbed the crater walls, a veritable city of them, walls stacked upon walls. Vacant windows gazed out from them, as black as the labyrinth below, melancholy. Above, beyond the crater rim, taller peaks rose bright and white against the blue, trailing chalk streamers of snow.
The sun gleamed cold and white.
Xonghis raised a blood-dirtied hand against the glare. "That way…" he said without emotion. He pointed over the bottomless plummet of the Screw to the crater wall behind them, to where the line of the rim rose like a shark or Sranc tooth. "I recognize that from when we first approached the mountain… That way is home." He turned back to the direction they had faced when they first ascended. "That is the Long Side."
Achamian caught his breath.
He had not forgotten his dream in the bowel of the mountain, the dream he had sought in vain for so many years
. But he had not remembered it either. Circumstances can blot the significance of our revelations as easily as otherwise. What did it matter, the realization of ardent desires, when all was death and damnation?
"Keep it, old friend. Make it your deepest secret…"
But circumstances had changed. They had escaped Cil-Aujas, and the revelatory memories now glowed through the fog of his privations. He had dreamed it! On the very threshold of hell he had dreamed his long-sought answer. A map, two thousand years old, slumbering beneath ruin and wilderness. A map to Ishuдl, and to the truth of the Aspect-Emperor.
"Bury it," the ancient High-King had said. "Bury it in the Coffers…"
In Marrow, Achamian had mentioned the Coffers the way a trapper baits his snare, as a crude goad meant to drive crude men. But now…
His lie. Fate was making his lie true.
The surviving Skin Eaters glanced at Xonghis, then surveyed the competing distances. But this moment, Achamian knew, had already been decided: There were no forks in the road before them. The Whore was driving them like slaves beaten toward a captor's capital.
"Yes…" Sarl coughed and laughed. "Yesss! The Coffers, boys! The Coffers-yes!"
And there it was. Somehow they were content to let a madman sound and settle the issue. Gazing through shanks of steel-grey hair, Lord Kosoter took the first downward step.
Mobbed beneath the heat radiating from the crimson glow of the Huiritic Ring, the company followed him, trundled down a slope of snowpacked ruin, onto the flat expanse of the frozen lake. A thin carpet of snow covered its nearer reaches, so they didn't see the ancient dead frozen beneath its surface until they had travelled a good portion of its length. Some were little more than shadows, either because the ice was clouded or they lay so deep. Others hung mere inches below the surface, strangely chapped and withered, like dead wasps in cocoons. The eyes looked like the pads of severed fingers. The mouths were all pried open, as though still, after all these ages, trying to draw air from the sky. The limbs were frozen in innumerable poses of falling. All of them were women and children.
No one spoke as they limped and tramped across them. Whatever curiosity they possessed had been beaten from them, and dread had become a constant companion.
They climbed what stairs they could find, up through the remnants of ancient pleasure-palaces. They saw all the same motifs and architectural flourishes, the same crazed density of image, that had so awed them in the galleries below. But for some reason it seemed tragic, pathetic even, exposed as it was by cracked walls and vanished ceilings. The work of a race that had gone insane for staring inward.
When they reached the summit of the crater rim, the inversion was so utter, the contrast to the buried depths so severe, that several of them fell to clinging whatever the ice or stone afforded. The dishevelled enormity of the Osthwai Mountains unfolded before them, glaring in the crisp high-sky light, great snow-sheathed horns receding across the horizon. The giddy sweep and plunge of endless open spaces encircled them, fluttered in their bellies. For a time at least, it was too much for newly born men.
But there was no question of stopping long. No matter how hard they sucked they could not draw enough air. Despite the heat shed by the Huiritic Ring, their skin purpled and their lips turned blue.
And they were starving.
But as they were about to descend, one of them called out, Soma, pointing back the way they came, at the ruins heaped about the rim of the Great Medial Screw. Achamian crowded with the others, peering to look, but his old eyes could make out nothing more than a speck crossing the snow-swept iron of the frozen lake. A lone figure trudging in their wake…
And at long last Mimara broke her silence.
"Cleric," she said.
INTERLUDE: MOMEN
The sound of discord carried on the breeze. A riot in faraway streets.
Kelmomas stood with his chin on the balcony rail, staring out over the Enclosure at the stately passage of clouds crossing the light of a moon too low on the horizon to be seen. Woollen blue wisped across the starred firmament, condensing into bellies of black.
The Nail of Heaven flared white from a sailing summit. A distant chorus of shrieks and bellows signalled another brutal torch-lit incursion.
He had no name for his rapture. Calm and slow breathing. Stationary. Stationary amid the clash of all things. The repose of a soul peering out from the world's shrouded centre. The unmoved mover.
The ruler unseen.
Across the sky he heard a many-throated song of defiance crumbling into cries of outrage, shouts of fear and dismay. The heave of hundreds breaking. The clash of arms.
You, the voice murmured. You made this.
"What are you doing out there?" his mother called out from the dark entrance to his room. She pulled aside the sheers to see him better.
"I'm scared, Mommy."
Her smile was too fraught to be reassuring.
"Shush. You're safe. They're not that many."
She held out an arm and he fell into it, hugging her about the waist. It was one of the innumerable habits linking little boys to their mothers. They walked to his bed together, into the light cast by a solitary hanging lamp. His new nurse, Emansi, had snuffed all the others.
The lantern's flame was a point that blistered to look at, that could not be touched, that threw all the shadows outward, away from the burnished ring of illuminated things. The crimson embroidery-ducks with interlocking wings-gleamed along the folds of his half-drawn covers. The mosaic of dancing bears stretched in a floriated arc into the darkness of the ceiling.
She pulled aside the covers and guided him into the folds with a gentle hand-yet one more thing he cherished with the ferocity of tears. Then she crawled in after him, cupped his small body in the warm palm of hers. She told herself, he knew, that she came here for his sake, that the loss of a brother was trauma enough, let alone the loss of a twin. Think of how intense their bond had been in infancy!
This was what she told herself, he knew.
He closed his eyes, followed the inner drift to the hazy outskirts of sleep. Her love seemed to encase him, to hold him hot and dry and safe. There was a nothingness in her arms, an oblivion indistinguishable from bliss. All cares fell away and with them, the cold-pocketed world that was their foundation. There was only here. There was only now. Another point of lantern-light, though no longer blistering, because he was the illumination.
Let others burn their fingers. Let them turn aside their eyes.
He rolled and snuggle-wriggled so that he could face her on the pillow. They stared into each other's eyes, mother and son, for several long moments. The immediacy of her was so vivid, so close, that nothing else could ever be as real. She was the only thing.
He ran a fingertip along the embroidered lip of the top blanket, a small proof of texture. He bent his face into the semblance of petulant concentration.
"I miss Sammi…" he lied.
She swallowed and blinked. "Me too, sweetling. Me too."
A part of him, the snake-sneaky part, laughed. Poor Samarmas. Poor-poor Samarmas.
"I didn't get to see Father."
Her eyes hardened beneath a film of tears.
"I'm sorry, Kel. We're at war. Your father, he… he has to make sacrifices. We all have to make sacrifices. Even darling little boys like you…"
She fell silent and remote, but he could see her thoughts clear enough. He does not mourn him. My husband does not mourn our son.
"Uncle Maithanet," the little Prince began, "he…"
A kind of wariness crept into her expression. Her eyes blinked away the fog of self-pity and suddenly became alert. "What about your uncle?"
"Nothing."
"Kel. What about your uncle?"
"He… watches you funny."
"What do you mean watches? How?"
"Is he angry at you, Mommy?"
"No. He's your uncle."
An inward look of cycling thoughts and worries.
"Which mean
s he's my brother," she added, but more for her own benefit, he knew, than for his. She reached out to cup his cheek in her left hand, the one bruised by what she called her "ancient tattoo."
The Prince-Imperial fluttered his lids as though overpowered by warmth and weariness. "But he has more power…" he whispered, pretending to fall asleep. He would open his eyes later, when her breathing slipped into the long trough of dreams.
Unseen rulers never slumbered, not truly.
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The Judging eye ta-1 Page 47
